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The devil tempts all men, but idle men tempt the devil.
-Arabic Proverb
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Speak of the Devil and he appears.
-Italian Proverb
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Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.
-Proverb
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Speak the truth and shame the devil.
-Proverb
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By bravely enduring it, an evil which cannot be avoided is overcome
-Proverb
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The love of evil is the root of all money.
-Proverb
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Of two evils, it is always best to vote for the least hypocritical.
-Proverb
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
-Hannah Arendt
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There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
-Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
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No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.
-Aristotle
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
-W. H. Auden
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I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
-W. H. Auden, 1-Sep-39
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Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
-Marcus Aurelius
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For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.
Bacon was referring to Jesus
-Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, bk. 2, ch. 21, sct. 9, 1605
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...He made no complaint whatsoever about the bad reputation he had attracted throughout the world, assured me that he himself was the person most concerned by the destruction of superstition, and admitted to me that as far as his own power was concerned he had been afraid on only one occasion, which was when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than his colleagues, shout out from the pulpit: 'Dearly beloved, never forget, when you hear anyone vaunt the progress of enlightenment, that the Devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist!'
-Charles Baudelaire, The Generous Gambler short story, published February 7, 1864
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Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
-Charles Baudelaire
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The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist
-Charles Baudelaire
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There is a method in man's wickedness; it grows up by degrees.
-Francis Beaumont
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There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.
-Saul Bellow
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
-John Berger
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Overcome evil with good. St. Paul
-Bible
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No evil shall happen to the just.
-Bible
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Whoever rewards evil for good, evil will not depart from their house.
-Bible
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Before man is life and death, good and evil; that which he shall choose shall be given him. Ecclesiasticus
-Bible
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It is a statistical fact that the wicked work harder to reach hell than the righteous do to enter heaven.
-Josh Billings
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Those that are evil have not only the good against them, but also the bad.
-Bischer
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The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even-if you will-eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
-Joseph Brodsky, Commencement Address, Williams College, 1984
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The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
-Heywood Hale Broun
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The devil's most devilish when respectable.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.
-Buddha
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It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
-Buddha
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-Edmund Burke
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When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
possible source for the famous quotation attributed to Burke: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. See also Plato's quotation in topic 'apathy'
-Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents, 1770
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The face of evil is always the face of total need.
-William S. Burroughs
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The devil is the author of confusion.
-Robert Burton
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Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long.
-Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part i. sect. 2, memb. 1, subsect. 2.
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Evil, and evil spirits, devils and devil possession, are the outgrowth of man's inadequate consciousness of God. We must avoid thinking of evil as a thing in itself-a force that works against man or, against God, if you will.
-Eric Butterworth
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May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.-
-George Carlin
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The devil has his elect.
-Thomas Carlyle
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All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
-Thomas Carlyle
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God bears with the wicked, but not forever.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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We may draw good out of evil; we must not do evil, that good may come.
-Maria Weston Chapman
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Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
-G. K. Chesterton
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There is wickedness in the intention of wickedness, even though it be not perpetrated in the act.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
-E. M. Cioran
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To do no evil is good, to intend none better.
-Claudius
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To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.
-Confucius
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A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
-Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, 1911
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All evils are equal when they are extreme.
-Pierre Corneille
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Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon their knees.
-William Cowper
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I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.
-David Cronenberg
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The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
-Aleister Crowley
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I am one of those who think like Nobel, than humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.
-Marie Curie
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It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
-Charles Darwin
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Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world.
-Marquis De Sade
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Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!
-Marquis De Sade
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I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
-Isak Dinesen
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I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
-Isak Dinesen
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Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.
-John Donne
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Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Satan isn't anything to believe in but there are people running things whose God is Lucifer. Check out the Lucifierian Doctrine which Albert Pike wrote. He said it is given to 29th-33rd rank Masons in his book Morals and Dogma.
-James Dye
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He was defeated 2000 years ago though there's many that feel that he is The Lord and that they will succeed.
-James Dye
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A wicked mortal is not the idea of God. He is little else than the expression of error. To suppose that sin, lust, hatred, envy, hypocrisy, revenge, have life abiding in them, is a terrible mistake. Life and Life's idea, Truth and Truth's idea, never make men sick, sinful, or mortal.
-Mary Baker Eddy
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Evil be to him who evil thinks.
-Edward II
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The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
-Albert Einstein
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No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
-George Eliot
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One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
-George Eliot
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So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another s.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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I know nothing more mocking than a devil that despairs.
-Johann von Goethe
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Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast.
The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement.
You, Simon? You believe in this?
I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him.
But ... The storm broke.
Sit down!
Shut up!
Take the conch!
Sod you!
Shut up!
Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch!
What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us.
Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum. Simon went on.
We could be sort of. . . . Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness. Inspiration came to him.
What's the dirtiest thing there is?
As an answer Jack dropped into the uncomprehending silence that followed it the one crude expressive syllable. Release was immense. Those littluns who had climbed back on the twister fell off again and did not mind. The hunters were screaming with delight.
(note: The inherent evils within man appear once law and order are taken from society.)
-William Golding, Lord of the Flies
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Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other ones invariably slink in after it.
-Baltasar Gracian
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If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, You Only Live Once.
-Sydney J. Harris
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The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself.
-Vance Havner
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There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
-Benjamin Haydon
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In avoiding the appearance of evil, I am not sure but I have sometimes unnecessarily deprived myself and others of innocent enjoyments.
-Rutherford B. Hayes, In Rutherford B. Hayes and His America (1954)
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Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Why should the devil have all the good tunes?
-Rowland Hill
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It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
-Eric Hoffer
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But evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart!
-Thomas Hood
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Remember only the good, the bad will never forget you.
-Doug Horton
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There is no bad in good.
-Doug Horton
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
-William James
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To rid ourselves of our shadows -- who we are -- we must step into either total light or total darkness. Goodness and evil.
-Jeremy P. Johnson
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The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things -- the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
-Samuel Johnson
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They that know no evil will suspect none.
-Ben Jonson
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It is profoundly tragic that I am a slave, but it is profoundly joyous that I am God's slave, not that of a devil.
-Kedar Joshi
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In hell, the Devil is God.
-Kedar Joshi
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It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The devil helps his servants for a season; but when they get into a pinch; he leaves them in the lurch.
-Sir Roger L'Estrange
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If Satan exists, and if he is clever at promoting Evil, then would he not agitate one section of mankind to go to war with an another - both believing God was on their side?
-Stephen Paul Lather, (quotation submitted to Quoteland)
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It is a power stronger than will. Could a stone escape from the laws of gravity? Impossible. Impossible, for evil to form an alliance with good.
-Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont
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This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
-Max Lerner
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I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
-C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, preface
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Satan is neither omnipotent nor free to do everything he pleases. Prince of the world he may be, but the Prince of Peace has come and dealt him a death blow.
-Harold Lindsell
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No wickedness proceeds on any grounds of reason.
-Livy
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The world loves a spice of wickedness.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The devil is God's ape!
-Martin Luther
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We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.
-Joseph De Maistre
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If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.
-Joseph De Maistre
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What nearly everybody in my life
-Marilyn Manson, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
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My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.
-Tony Martin
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Evil is something you recognize immediately you see it: it works through charm.
-Brian Masters
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There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worse part of oneself.
-Patrick Mcgoohan
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What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.
-John Milton
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Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.
-Gabriel Riqueti Mirabeau
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Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
-Blaise Pascal
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I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still and quiet in a room alone.
-Blaise Pascal
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Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.
-Phaedrus
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There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
-Plato
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Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.
-Alexander Pope
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Wickedness is its own punishment.
-Francis Quarles
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I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil, but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.
-Kathleen Raine
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All histories do show, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.
-Sir Walter Raleigh
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Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
-Anne Rice
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There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.
-Fran
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We often do good in order that we may do evil with impunity.
-Fran
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At sometime in our lives a devil dwells within us, causes heartbreaks, confusion and troubles, then dies.
-Theodore Roosevelt
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Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.
-Albert Schweitzer
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Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
-Haile Selassie
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No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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The sun also shines on the wicked.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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The devil can site scripture for his own purpose! An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek. Merchant Of Venice
-William Shakespeare
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The devil has the power to assume a pleasing shape.
-William Shakespeare
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There's small choice in rotten apples.
-William Shakespeare
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The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
-William Shakespeare
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But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil.
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ,
And seem I a saint, when most I play the Devil.
-William Shakespeare, King Richard III
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I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
-George Bernard Shaw
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No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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It is safest to be moderately base -- to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.
-Sydney Smith
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There is only one good -- knowledge; and only one evil -- ignorance.
-Socrates
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The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
-Socrates
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If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
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The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him. If it were not for the laws of the land, we should soon see a massacre of the righteous. Jesus was watched by his enemies, who were thirsting for his blood: his disciples must not look for favour where their Master found hatred and death.
-C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon, The Treasury of David
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Of two evils, choose neither.
-C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon
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We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
-George Steiner
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The devil doesn't know how to sing, only how to howl.
-Francis Thompson
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The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
-A. W. Tozer
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Truly has it been said; that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-Source Unknown
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Evil spelled backward is live.
-Source Unknown
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Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.
-Alan Valentine
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Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.
-Virgil
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You must have the devil in you to succeed in the arts.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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What is worse than evil? The inability to bear it.
-C. J. Weber
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Let guilty men remember, their black deeds
Do lean on crutches made of slender reeds.
-John Webster, The White Devil; (act V, sc. 6)
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Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.
-Simone Weil
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Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attraction of others.
-Oscar Wilde
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As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.
-Oscar Wilde
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One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses.
-Robin Wood
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Books about Evil
